Note-taking for User Experience Design with June Ahn Don Norman discusses affordances and constraints in The Design of Everyday Things, Chapter Four: Knowing What To Do. User experience design is easy in situations where there’s only one thing that the user can possibly do. But as the possibilities multiply, so do the challenges. We can deal with …
Tag Archives: GarageBand
Project-based music technology teaching
I use a project-based approach to teaching music technology. Technical concepts stick with you better if you learn them in the course of making actual music. Here’s the list of projects I assign to my college classes and private students. I’ve arranged them from easiest to hardest. The first five projects are suitable for a …
Musical shares
Recently we had some guys from Splice.com visit NYU to show off their intriguing new product. (It’s basically GitHub for musicians.) The Splice guys demonstrated the power of networked collaboration with an exercise they call “musical shares.” Everybody starts a track in some DAW (we used GarageBand.) You work on your track for ten minutes. …
The poetics of rock
I’m teaching at Montclair State University because of Adam Bell, a fellow self-taught rock and pop musician turned academic. Adam loves to quote The Poetics of Rock by Albin Zak, and rightly so. Zak’s major point is that rock is an art form about making records, and that the creativity in making records is only …
First day of music tech class
I recently began my second semester of teaching Music Technology 101 at Montclair State University. In a perfect world, I’d follow Mike Medvinsky’s lead and dive straight into creative music-making on day one. However, there are logistical reasons to save that for day two. Instead, I started the class with a listening party, a kind …
How to write a pop song
My students are currently hard at work writing pop songs, many of them for the first time. For their benefit, and for yours, I thought I’d write out a beginner’s guide to contemporary songwriting. First, some points of clarification: This post only talks about the instrumental portion of the song, known as the track. I …
Shared sample projects
My students at NYU and Montclair State are beginning to venture into producing their own tracks. There are two challenges facing them, the small one and the big one. The small challenge is learning the tools: remembering where the menus are and which key you hold down to turn the mouse pointer into a pencil, …
User Interface Design for Music Learning Software
Computers have revolutionized the composition, production and recording of music. However, they have not yet revolutionized music education. While a great deal of educational software exists, it mostly follows traditional teaching paradigms, offering ear training, flash cards and the like. Meanwhile, nearly all popular music is produced in part or in whole with software, yet …
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User interface case study: iOS Garageband
Apple has long made a practice of giving away cool software with their computers. One of the coolest such freebies is Garageband. It’s a stripped down version of Logic aimed at beginners, and it’s a surprisingly robust tool. The software instruments and loops sound terrific, the interface is approachable, and it’s generally a great scratchpad. …
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Image schemas in music software
I’m doing a ton of writing for grad school, and will be posting the highlights here. First off, an abstract and discussion of this article: Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48 …